Welcome to part 2 of DIYCraftPhotography’s ongoing Etsy shop case study! We’re building an Etsy shop and sharing all the details right here!

Today we’re going to look at writing search friendly Etsy listing titles so your products can grab traffic from Google and Etsy searchers. We’ll look at successful Etsy shops, deconstruct the way they write listing titles, and break it down into a formula for your own products. This technique is great, especially for new shops. It gets your items showing up in search and in front of buyers – exactly what you need to start making sales.

The vast majority of Etsy shops never make it past the initial “hump” of getting beyond a handful of sales. The good news: there is a 99% probability that your slow sales are not because there’s something wrong with your product. There’s someone for everything. (Seriously.) The challenge is in connecting with that someone (or someones) and marketing to them. That’s the bad news. Reaching customers is tough.

Behind every successful shop is a long story of hard work and perseverance. Sure, some shops get lucky – and sometimes lightning strikes in the middle of a sunny day. That’s okay, we’re going to build ourselves a lightning rod!

Meet the Etsy Case Study Shop

Before we go any further, I’d like to show you the shop I used for this case study (yes, it’s a real shop!). I used my own Etsy shop, a shop I started in 2009 to sell plushies. It has 19 sales (over the course of 5 years) and virtually no traffic (people visiting). No sales yet this year, and maybe 2 last year. This shop is basically dead. (I’ve been a bad shop mom. 🙁 )

But that just meant it was starting with the same problems that most shop owners have – no traffic! No sales!

Note: It’s not a “secret shop” or anything like that, and all the traffic studies featured below were conducted before I exposed the shop on DIYCraftPhotography (and subsequent tidal wave of traffic). The shop is named Weird Little Friends. You can visit the shop and say hi. My plush love visitors. 🙂

At the start of this case study (back in February), the shop had just two items and the names aren’t very good. The names aren’t findable. The products themselves are great, but standing out on Etsy requires a bit of linguistic wizardry when it comes to writing titles. Here’s how to write a great Etsy listing title designed to grab search traffic.

What’s in a Listing Name?

Use all 140 characters to maximize your chance to show up in searches

Suppose you’re selling a plush fish on Etsy. You might be tempted to name it “plush fish” and be done with it.

(This is what I did for years.)

There’s a better way to name your Etsy items.

Do these 2 things when you write your listing title:

Use all 140 characters allowed

Pack it full of relevant terms

Think of all the words and phrases that describe your item. Starting with the three most relevant words, work your way from left to right. A rough Etsy title “formula” looks like:

Not convinced? I resisted, too. But once I did it, I went from 0 views a day to a couple a day plus some favorites and treasury additions. Whuatt?! I didn’t change the item or the photos, just the freakin’ name!

The best way to get good at this is to keep practicing. It’s free to edit your existing listings, so go ahead and edit a few of yours with longer SEO-friendly names.

Case Study Shop: Listing Title Improvements

Here’s another example from our case study shop.

The other item was “Big Grub (Custom)”. This name had a nice brevity to it, but it wasn’t helping the item show up in search. Who searches for “grubs” anyway? Unless you’ve met met and are familiar with my brand and product, you probably don’t think to type “grubs” into Etsy, even if you would actually like my product if you saw it in real life.

“After” the listing update: this item has loads of good keywords in the title now.

How’d it work out? Pretty darn good. Between this change and the change we’ll talk about next week (adding more listings), my shop went from 0-1 views a day to what looks like an average of 4 or 5 a day with some days coming in over 10!

Check out this pretty graph:

One more thing to try

In the Etsy keyword tool you can compare the cost to list an ad targeting various keywords. This gives you a sense of what words are considered valuable in Etsy’s eyes. In my case, I found that “insect plush” doesn’t even rank (few people are searching for it, if any) but an ad targeting “plush narwhal” is $5.00 per 1,000 impressions! My grubs are kind of narwhal-ish and might appeal to someone who likes narwhals. Rather than describing my item as an insect, perhaps I should pretend it’s a hornless narwhal. 🙂

Browsing the keyword tool is just another way to find terms related to your item.

Etsy Item Title Do’s and Don’ts

Quick tips for writing your search friendly Etsy listing titles:

Do put the most relevant words first

Do use as close to 140 characters as you can

Do consult a thesaurus/friend/search engine if you need help describing your item

Do use similar words – “silver” and “grey”, “ocean” and “lake”, etc

Do speak the language of your customer – if you insist it’s not retro, but 9 out of 10 friends think it’s retro, it’s probably retro

Do use commas to separate search terms

Do mention materials, color, size

Don’t put completely irrelevant words into your title (that’s called “keyword stuffing” and it is frowned upon by Google and Etsy)

Reader Interactions

Comments

Thanks so much for this and all your informative articles. I am one of those people who likes simple creative names so this will help me fix that bad habit so Etsy customers can find my items more. I would love to see something that would help with tags for Etsy too. Thanks again! Love it!

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